Building the City of Spectacle

By the time he left office on May 16, 2011, Mayor Richard M. Daley had served six terms and more than twenty-two years at the helm of Chicago's City Hall, making him the longest serving mayor in the city’s history. Richard M. Daley was the son of the legendary machine boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley, who had presided over the city during the post–World War II urban crisis. Richard M. Daley led a period of economic restructuring after that difficult era by building a vibrant tourist economy. Costas Spirou and Dennis R. Judd focus on Richard M. Daley’s role in transforming Chicago’s economy and urban culture.

The construction of the "city of spectacle" required that Daley deploy leadership and vision to remake Chicago’s image and physical infrastructure. He gained the resources and political power necessary for supporting an aggressive program of construction that focused on signature projects along the city’s lakefront, including especially Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Museum Campus, Northerly Island, Soldier Field, and two major expansions of McCormick Place, the city’s convention center. During this period Daley also presided over major residential construction in the Loop and in the surrounding neighborhoods, devoted millions of dollars to beautification efforts across the city, and increased the number of summer festivals and events across Grant Park. As a result of all these initiatives, the number of tourists visiting Chicago skyrocketed during the Daley years.

Daley has been harshly criticized in some quarters for building a tourist-oriented economy and infrastructure at the expense of other priorities. Daley left his successor, Rahm Emanuel, with serious issues involving a long-standing pattern of police malfeasance, underfunded and uneven schools, inadequate housing opportunities, and intractable budgetary crises. Nevertheless, Spirou and Judd conclude, because Daley helped transform Chicago into a leading global city with an exceptional urban culture, he also left a positive imprint on the city that will endure for decades to come.

Building the City of Spectacle

"In this book, Costas Spirou and Dennis R. Judd argue persuasively that the 'city of spectacle,' despite the critiques often made of it, offers significant benefits to the economy of Chicago and to its residents. This outcome, according to their interesting account, was the result of the construction of a powerful mayoralty by Richard M. Daley, which was not the consequence of either the inheritance of his father's machine or the operation of a power elite, but rather arose from Daley's astute manipulation of various constituencies, including Chicago's African American and Latino populations."—Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard Graduate School of Design, author of The Just City

Building the City of Spectacle

"The sometimes impenetrable Mayor Daley is thoughtfully detailed, dissected, and critiqued in Building the City of Spectacle, which is a fun read, too!—Terry Nichols Clark, University of Chicago, editor of The City as an Entertainment Machine

Building the City of Spectacle

"In Building the City of Spectacle, Costas Spirou and Dennis R. Judd critically assess the achievements and missteps of Richard M. Daley's mayoralty. In doing so they revisit fundamental debates in urban political economy: How much power does government have to influence the fortunes of cities in a globalized economy? Are the benefits of urban spectacles like Millennium Park and Navy Pier enjoyed widely or are they captured by tourists and elites? And do positive outcomes absolve the

often ruthless tactics used to attain them? The authors make clear that, as a city builder, Daley belongs in a category with Daniel Burnham and Robert Moses—with just as many peccadillos and contradictions."—Rachel Weber, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of From Boom to Bubble

Building the City of Spectacle

"Costas Spirou and Dennis R. Judd place Richard M. Daley's twenty-two-year mayoralty within the broader context of America’s post–World War II saga of urban decline, tumult, and renaissance, making the case that Daley’s approach to wresting Chicago from the postindustrial abyss was both calculated and efficacious, though not without engendering significant costs. It is unlikely that future interpreters of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Chicago will challenge the fundamentals of their assessment."—Larry Bennett, DePaul University, author of The Third City

Building the City of Spectacle

"Costas Spirou and Dennis R. Judd provide the definitive work on Richard M. Daley, the most important mayor of our time, and how he used arts, culture and more to revitalize the great city of Chicago."—Richard Florida, University Professor, University of Toronto, author of Rise of the Creative Class

Costas Spirou

Costas Spirou is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and Sociology at Georgia College & State University. He is the author of Urban Tourism and Urban Change: Cities in a Global Economy and coauthor of It's Hardly Sportin’: Stadiums, Neighborhoods and the New Chicago.